Hellflower (v1.1) (25 page)

It’s touching, the enthusiasms of the young.

"Je, sure, absolutely-now get in the sling, dammit." RoaqMheri was history in my rearview screen now and her big sister RoaqMhone was filling up all my sky. I dropped
Firecat
like a hot rock all the way down through atmosphere to the air traffic lanes. Let Errol follow me through that if he wanted his chobosh back that bad. I ducked again and was down at theoretical treetop level, heading out for the open desert.

I punched out a call to Parxifal, telling him I was landing his chobosh Real Soon Now. With luck, Errol’d tap my transmission and hold back in favor of arguing on the downside. It looked like the damn chobosh was going to be delivered after all.

"Well?" I demanded.

"I don’t see him," said Tiggy, unrepentant.

"Light Lady
is still following," Paladin said. "Oncoming," he added.

Hell. Heading right toward me in RoaqMhone’s sky was two cyberfreighters making a alternate approach to RoaqPort. I targeted on one of them, slid the length of it on
Firecat’s
belly and went straight up through the flare. Engine exhaust blanked sensors as my Best Girl scrammed for high ground.

The sky went from pink to black as we left atmosphere and I didn’t sec
Light Lady
anywhere. Now all
Firecat
had to do was disappear between where near-space sensors left off and atmospheric sensors took over-lots of ships drop off the tracking screens there for up to ten minutes and nobody notices much. I checked my sensors to make sure
Firecat
was in the gray range and tried to decide whether to deliver the damn veg or go back to Plan A.

Light Lady
made up my mind for me. She came diving right cut of the primary, turbocannon blazing as bright as a cliché. I angled the bumpers
Firecat
had left but
Lady’s
cannon came in right over them and left me about as much control over
Firecat
as I had over galactic government.

I blinked the sun dogs out of my eyes and tried to turn her, but my Best Girl wasn’t having any. The ship rocked as Errol hit us again. "Goddammit, Fenshee, do you want your cargo or not?" I demanded of the empty air.

"Kore
San’Cyr-" Tiggy, floating behind edge of the cockpit, could see what was going on and Sounded worried. Half my board was red already.

"Butterfly, let Errol have the chobosh. By the time Rimini discovers Errol Lightfoot has his cargo back, it will no longer matter," Paladin said.

"I’m trying!" I pointed out. My board said that I finally had a communications tracer locked on
Light Lady.
I opened the channel.
"Light Lady,
this is
Firecat.
You can have your damn cargo back but you gotta let me get downside to off-load it-"

Light Lady
hit us last licks, just for luck. The whole ship kicked once, then everything in the cockpit went red and all of a sudden there wasn’t any sound at all in the ship.

"This isn’t
fair!"
I shouted, and bashed some harmless inoffensive switches that didn’t work any more anyway.

"Primary impellers gone, secondary impellers gone, port and starboard attitude jets jammed," Paladin chanted. "Para-light systems gone, lifters jammed-"

But we were still moving.
Firecat
hadn’t been in orbit when she was hit. We were headed for RoaqMhone at several hundred kliks per second, and nothing on my board worked.

"Tiggy, go back and web up. Now."

"Are we going to die,
Kore-alarthme?"

"— para-gravity systems stripped, weapons systems inoperative, heat-exchangers overloaded-"

"No," I said. I started flipping switches, shunting everything to alternate engine feeds, purging the goforths into space to cool them quick. If they worked at all after that they’d be junk six seconds later, but better them than me.

Firecat
was heating up. Another few degrees and that damned chobosh was going to be stir-fry. Some telltales on the board was flickering back to green as Paladin and me worked on them, but it was a major case of too little too late.

"-front and rear deflectors gone-"

We was back in atmosphere and
Firecat
started to glow. "Dammit, doesn’t anything still work on this ship?" In a few minutes it wouldn’t matter any more if Tiggy did think I’d lost my marbles. "Commo gear-I am letting Parxifal know where
Firecat
is going down. He has acknowledged and is sending a team. Port and starboard deflectors are operational, also nose jets and tail docking grapnel. And the hatch mechanism," Paladin said.

"Terrific." Every sensor on the status deck was blinking red-at least the ones that still lit up. The outside sensors was gone but the in-hull sensors was still intact; I could eyeball the
Lady
following me down.

It was sonic compensation to imagine the look on Errol’s face as he realized his precious cargo was about to become ashes over Mhone City, but not much.

Two plates of
Firecat’s
goforths shattered and drifted loose of their brackets. Maybe the rest’d work now. I started the cold-stmt sequence and realized
Firecat’d
be intimate with RoaqMhone long before it was finished.

The atmosphere was screaming around the hull, and the inside air was fouling too quickly. I wrapped the leftover deflectors around
Firecat
as far as they’d go and started sonic serious plea-bargaining for a dc cent afterlife. Tiggy was saying something real quiet in helltongue and Paladin was going on about how tile doubletalk generators was fused and the widget interlocks was frozen and the veeblefeetzer’d fell off some time back, just like he didn’t care he was going to die. I watched the cold-start gauges and didn’t pay any attention.

"Hold together, you nasty-tempered piece of candy."
Firecat’s
registry classifies her hull-type as "acutely oblate spheroid"; we did some gliding but not enough to save us. I had enough attitude jets still avail able to keep my Best Girl from going down nose-first but I was glad RoaqMhone was mostly uninhabited. Paladin finished his damage report and shut up. When push came to crunch, I was the pilot, not him.

Our distance off the floor could be measured in meters. Now or never. I overrode the cold-start sequence and called all
Firecat’s
engines up full.

Babby tried to turn herself inside out. I was blind after the first engine flare and everywhere metal touched me I got burned. There was so much noise I couldn’t hear anything Paladin was saying, and my dosimeter went fade-to-black.

Firecat
went from x-kliks-per-second to none in zero time. Uncompensated inertia broke the chobosh loose and Tiggy went flying into the nose of the ship. Lucky for me I was strapped in-I just broke a couple of ribs.

Then the goforths exploded.

The force took the path of least resistance-out through the open engine bay.

It was like riding a rocket. The cockpit slammed back into the hold when
Firecat
finally hit Roaq desert. and the last of the working sensors dumped memory. I sat there in the brilliant dark listening to the sand remove what was left of
Firecat’s
hull and wondering if I’d finally managed to kill Valijon Starbringer of the Gentle People.

Finally we stopped. "Paladin?"

"Here, Butterfly."

"Tiggy-jon?"

"I don’t know. I am disconnected from
Firecat’s
sensors."

Which didn’t have any power anyway, assuming there was any sensors left to be disconnected from after that ride. Fortunately Paladin can get along without a power source for awhiles, but it’d cut the range of the RTS down to meters.

"Going to kill that sonabitch."

"Butterfly?"

"Not bad enough he breaks quarantine and lands in our cornfield."

"Butterfly?"

"And talks elders into letting him lead crusade. No. Now he’s gotta-"

"Butterfly, where are we?" That got my attention. I looked around, but everything was dark, so I didn’t know whether I could see or not. "Down. Somewhere on RoaqMhone. I think. You want any details, better flag a passing stranger, bai."

Everything hurt as I dragged myself out of the mercy scat. When I was up on deck I could see light coming in through the hullports, which answered the question of whether or not I could still see. The smell of mashed, irradiated, half-cooked chobosh was thick enough to slice and sell.

I dug Tiggy out from under the mashed chobosh cartons and found out my ribs really was broken or doing a good imitation. Tiggy was breathing. He’d banged hell out of himself with that sudden stop, but nothing was broken far as I could tell, and the biopak on his leg was intact. I unfolded him and laid him out. From the look on his face he’d be having sweet real expensive dreams for awhiles yet, and not much I Could do but get out of here before I joined him.

The hatch mechs were jammed but by that time I was coked up enough on chobosh to pull the emergency manual release. The hatch blew off, leaving me looking at a whole lot of the Roaq’s desert livened only by the interesting sight of
Light Lady
parked right next door. She didn’t look any more trustworthy in broad daylight, and Errol was wearing jeans even tighter than the last pair I’d seen him in. He was lounging against the
Lady’s
landing strut, and if he thought he was getting his cargo back now he had more delusions than a Tangervel dreamshop.

I stepped carefully out of
Firecat
and
Light Lady’s
cannon moved to follow me. Slaved, like as not. Could be they’d blow me wayaway for moving too fast-or getting too close to Errol-or maybe just track me until he gave them the high sign. I started walking toward him. Between the landing and the chobosh I couldn’t really feel my feet, but they was still there when I looked down.

"Darling!" Errol sang out happily. "What a marvelous landing! I admit that at first I didn’t think you’d be able to do it, but then I said to myself. ‘Errol, m’lad, this is the woman who-‘ "

By then I was close enough to punch Errol Lightfoot in the face. He wasn’t expecting that. He hit the hull of the ship going away and I followed him down to finish it. It wasn’t bright, but Tiggy’d approve.

The
Lady’s
first blast just missed us. I heard the guns track to the end of the traverse, lay over with a grating sound that spoke volumes for Errol’s lousy maintenance, and then track back the other way.

Errol-the-Peril had indeed programmed his slaveguns to shoot anything that moved too fast.

Including him.

"Errol Lightfoot, you idiot!" I suggested, and dived under the ship. "Guns of yours the stupidest thing I ever seen in my whole entire life," I panted. Finally the cannon stopped looking for something to shoot.

"Stupider than trying to land a ship without power in the middle of the desert?" Errol smiled sunnily and brandished a blaster. "Now that that’s settled, I know we’ll have so many things to share with each other."

I wiped blood off my chin and wondered how I was going to arrange things so Errol didn’t kill me. Meanwhile the boy wonder of the spaceways regarded me with a commendable steadiness of purpose.

"You say we’ve met. Now I’m certain I should remember someone as dangerous as you. So tell me-"

"I’m not here to play Twenty Questions."

"-just what possessed you to run off with my cargo that way?" Errol finished smoothly.

"Can you think of a better way to run off with it? You was set up, Errol-bai, and it’ll cost you to find out who."

"One meets so many people-and since I don’t believe you anyway, why should I bargain for information you don’t have? Now if you don’t want to even more closely resemble your ship, you’re going to unload her right now so that I can be off. If you’re a good girl, I’ll even take you with me."

Twenty godlost years, and Errol hadn’t changed one line of his dialogue. For just one minute it seemed reasonable to try to kill him to hold onto a cargo of damaged chobosh I didn’t even want, but then I saw the line of dust on the horizon and remembered that I held trumps. "You’re right, Errol. And there’s just one thing I want you to do before I surrender."

"And what might that be, darling?"

The
Lady’s
proximity sensors blipped and Errol spun round. "Look behind you."

A land-yacht was heading toward us and I was betting it was one of Parxifal’s. I leaned back against the hull of the
Lady,
and did some grinning of my own.

###

One advantage of being a independent contractor rather than a free-lancer like Errol is that when somebody else already owns your cargo they got a real vested interest in seeing it stays safe and warm.

Case in point: Parxifal’s headhunters coming over the rise to make sure I got what was rightfully Errol’s. They lay down a nice covering tire to keep Errol from getting back aboard
Light Lady,
and I stayed safe out of the way while a hardboy named Olione I remembered from last time I was here used a riot-gas grenade to put Errol down for the count. Olione bounced it off
Firecat
, Errol caught it, it went off. Good night sweet prince, and the end of act one.

Olione’s cheering section moved in to pick up the pieces and Olione turned to me.

"You are Butterfly St. Cyr." Olione was saurian, and you never can tell what a lizard’s thinking, especially when it’s speaking Interphon, but I could of sworn he was surprised.

"Too reet, babby, didn’t Parxifal tell you I was coming? Got your chobosh right here." He had an excuse for being thick; his face and neck was bruised like someone’d used him for target practice. Perils of the game, I’d guess.

Olione looked back at Errol. "Then who is this man?" The cheering section had dumped Errol-the-ex-Peril at our feet. He was out cold. "Fenshee free-lancer hight Errol Lightfoot as used to be in the chobosh bidness," I said, joycing up the lingua franca of deep space for benefit of the home office. I turned Errol over with my foot, but T still couldn’t feel anything about him like what the talkingbooks said I should.